If Mark Langowski flags you down on the sidewalk, it’s a good thing.
The 44-year-old stops New Yorkers who appear especially fit and asks them what they do to stay in shape.
Doing so yields great social media fodder — he has 1.5 million followers on Instagram and several hundred thousand more on TikTok and YouTube — and some surprising answers.
“A guy said he does 10,000 pushups in a day,” Langowski told The Post. “He was incredibly ripped, but, like, you can’t really do anything else with your day if you’re doing 10,000 pushups.”
Langowski, a personal trainer and gym manager, started making the videos just over a year ago after growing frustrated with the workout content he saw online.
“I was sick of the narcissistic melting pot of garbage that social media had become, especially in the fitness industry, where it was just constantly, ‘Look at me, look at me do push ups, look at my abs,’” he said. “And I’d always been interested in what other people did to stay fit.”
Langowski doesn’t appear on camera in his short videos, and he makes an effort to feature everyday people who are in great shape, not those who work in the fitness industry.
“I try and find the mom-of-three with three kids at home. I try and find the Wall Street dad. I try and find the garbage man, the policeman,” he said. “I really try and get a variety.”
One of his first posts to go viral was a chat with a “ripped” UPS man in September 2023.
“I don’t do weights, just calisthenics, pull-ups, dips, push-ups. And keep going,” the man, who wore the brown uniform with swagger, said.
When Langowski asked him how many pull-ups he could do — a common question that occasionally results in someone demonstrating their abilities on scaffolding or a traffic signal — the man said, “Real men, they don’t count.”
Langowski finds most of his subjects downtown, typically in Soho and the West Village. It’s not that people uptown aren’t fit, he said, but they don’t tend to dress with it on display.
New Yorkers’ fitness strategies range.
A 56-year-old cannabis dealer with amazing upper body definition credited skateboarding for toning his abs.
A young woman running in Central Park said she ate pizza, donuts and “like[d] her wine.”
A “jacked” 40-year-old man admitted he had been consuming 25 drinks a week and supplemented with black seed oil, sea moss, ashwagandha and chlorophyll.
A 23-year-old finance guy outside The Trump Building claimed he eats “as much protein as [he] possibly can” — a staggering 280 grams a day.
But, there are some answers that come up over and over.
“No matter what they’re doing, they’re consistent,” Langowski said of his subjects’ routines.
Prioritizing strength training is another common refrain.
“They’re lifting weights three days [or more] a week,” he said. And, he noted, “they’re not killing themselves with cardio.”
And, despite some outliers, most subjects tend to have healthy — but not perfect — diets and drink alcohol only sparingly.
“The average person that I interview has between 3 to 5 drinks a week,” said Langoswki, who lives in Midtown East.
He does the vast majority of his interviews in New York City, but he has occasionally taken the show on the road to the Hamptons, Miami and Los Angeles. He’s found that his subjects conform to the clichés about where they live.
“People in LA wanted to talk to me forever. My average interview in LA was 10 minutes,” he said. And, “people had a little bit more New Age things where they were like, ‘I believe in grounding. I need to walk where my feet touch the pavement for at least three hours a day.’ Or, ‘I don’t believe in sunscreen. So I walk around and I take the sun in for six hours a day.‘”
By contrast, his Big Apple interviews are short and sweet, typically about a minute and a half, two minutes tops.
“We’re not rude, us New Yorkers,” he said. “But we got somewhere to go.”
